Being an expert on online shopping, why do you think so many consumers lack value in the items they are purchasing and how it affects their lives?

People are buying a lot of valuable items this season. I think that they are looking for things that they are going to love and that is what value really is. Being able to use things that you already have is also important, I’ve become kind of obsessed with extending the life of things that I currently have in my closet.

The majority of our readers are young professionals with tight budgets. What are some tips or tricks that you can offer to spruce up their wardrobe?

A couple of things. A belt is a great thing to own. It can be used over a dress or a sweater and can change the whole look of an outfit. I especially love accessories like scarves, especially when I travel. For those of you who may do corporate travel, try not to pack a lot of clothes, instead, pack accessories that can change one outfit into many looks. I also think it is important to have a good tailor. There maybe some things in your closet that just don’t fit right or it’s not the right trend that can be altered.

As an entrepreneur, do you have any advice to people looking to get into the fashion industry or starting their own business?

Well I think it definitely is something that you have to love, because you will be working all the time. I started in 2004 and I am never off the clock. I wouldn’t trade it or work for anyone else, so my advice is to not give up.

What are some items that we can add around the house to make it more calm and relaxing after a long day’s work?

I love having my clothes and linens smell really amazing, so I buy a detergent like Gain that comes in a variety different scents. Since you only have to use a cap full, you get more product out of the bottle. Whatever mood you are in, they have a scent that would work for you.

When our surroundings are organized we tend to lead less stressful lives. What are some organizational tools that we can use both at home and the office?

When you have a cleared out closet or desk drawer, it sort of clears your mind. Sometimes when I am stuck in my business, I do a “clean-out” around the office and at home. It’s good to clear the clutter, which I think is great for people to try when they are stressed.

Can you give our readers a few fashion tips for the winter season?

If you have a pair of rain boots buy fleece liners or sheep-skin liners and put them inside the boots. This makes them into winter boots, which is great because it’s getting colder. You can do the same thing with tights, especially plush tights. Which you can wear with a summer dress and put a sweater under or over the dress. Then you have a long-sleeve winter dress, which you can wear all season round.

As young professionals living on a tight budget and constantly running, I am sure that we can each find value in the advice that Michelle provided. To learn more about the women’s online content pioneer log on to www.shefinds.com or about her “Find Value and Get More Out of the Things You Have” campaign log on to www.ilovegain.com.

Is it fab or just a fad? Will you be joining in? Sound off below and let us know.

Fair Isaac, creator of the FICO score, has rolled out to all three credit bureaus its newest general-purpose FICO score, dubbed FICO 08. With this new version of the credit score, FICO says its will disregard collection accounts and other dings on your credit file when the original balance owed was under $100.

The logic there,” says FICO’s Tom Quinn, “is that for small dollar amounts, like a collection notice from a public library system, the (credit scoring) model will now bypass those and not consider those to be negative. Any kind of derogatory public information that’s less than $100” will be excluded, Quinn adds.

This certainly has the potential to help boost your FICO score if it was impacted by such a blemish. But beware: amid the credit crunch, every single account you have, and every single financial transaction you engage in is being analyzed to determine your credit worthiness.

Originally posted here.

Entrepreneurs tend to create personal financial statements for one of two reasons. Either they love numbers and want to track expenses and income in order to know what makes their business tick, or they are meeting with a lender or an investor who will want to review financial statements.

Business owners who are intimidated by financial analysis tend to fall into the second group—they act only when pushed. But that can be a mistake. Knowing one’s way around a financial statement is an important step in maturing as a business owner. A personal financial statement is also a helpful tool in helping you to understand the separation (and blurring of the line) between an individual’s assets and liabilities, and those associated with his or her business venture.

To be sure, managing financial statements is not exactly the most creative or glamorous aspects of running a business. “If ever I ask people why they want to start a business, it’s a sense of self fulfillment or I want someone to be able to experience this certain product,” says Chuck Matthews, executive director of the center for entrepreneurship, education and research at the University of Cincinnati. “But creating and maintaining a budget is one of the most important things to do.”

So, whether you are ready or not, you should sit down with your financial account information and create a series of Excel spreadsheets—starting with a balance sheet and income statement. These documents will make up your personal financial statement.

Creating a Personal Finance Statement: The Balance Sheet

A balance sheet’s purpose is to show the assets you own and the liabilities you owe. When calculated, the positive assets and negative liabilities will show your net worth.

Among the assets to include on your balance sheet: bank account balances, the value of stocks owned, and the value of your property. Simply log on to your bank’s account and any brokerage accounts to obtain current numbers. In order to obtain accurate property values, you’ll want to call your real-estate agent who does appraisal and get an updated value assigned to any property you own. While you’ll want to create a new personal financial statement every month, this step isn’t necessary every time – just try to keep your property value updated each quarter.

As for liabilities, add any sort of lease, mortgage, credit-card debt, or loans you are currently repaying. Simply log on to your lender’s site (which might be the same as your personal and business accounts from the assets column) and get the most recent numbers. Some easily overlooked liabilities are tax payments and accounts payable.

It helps to consider this balance sheet just a snapshot of what you have and what you owe. You are not creating a ledger for the week, month, or year. You are simply trying to take a picture of your net worth at one moment in time.

For a complete list of all the items a balance sheet can include, check out Inc.com’s detailed guide.

The fashion-forward shoes usually run for under $200, boast thick wooden platforms and 6-inch plus heels.

Check out a few of our favs below:

When it comes to marketing, the sky is the limit, there are so many options and such a wide range of price tags and effectiveness. What works for one business may not work for another, what works for one location may be a total waste of money for another. So, here’s a list of tips to help you market your business better and make sure your marketing dollars are running a money fountain and not being drained away:

Stop doing what you are doing, whether it’s flyers, print ads, direct mail, or whatever it is that you’re marketing your business with. Don’t do anything just because competition or others are doing it. Assess your marketing efforts and expenses and identify what works for your business and what doesn’t! Cut back on all that’s not working for you and double down on what works! Simple.

Be Memorable: In the crowd of so many businesses, products, services, how does your business stand out? Why should someone remember you once they walk out of your store? Why should they talk about you and spread the word? Give them a reason! Start with being different, talk-able, and laughable! People remember funny stuff and talk about it, even if they have nothing to do with it. Identify the appropriate humor for your audience and integrate it in to your marketing! Be memorable!

Offer Freemium: This is a strategy as old as business itself. Give something for free so that your customers can try it and eventually start buying it. Software and web based businesses do it the best by offering a free plan with limited features and a paid plan with much more features. Starbucks does it by giving bite size cakes and shot size drinks whenever they introduce a new drink or bakery. Find out how you can offer your product/ service in a freemium model and test it for a couple of weeks to see if it works for you!

Leverage Social Media: Should I use Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or what? What and how should I be promoting my business via social media? Seriously, I just can’t stop being surprised every time people ask me such question! Be who you are and do what you do. There is a reason why it’s called ‘social’. It’s the same people, same society, only the medium has changed. How do you treat people and friends in real life, treat them the same way because the number of friends and followers you are boasting about, each one of them is a flesh & blood real person behind it, and so don’t treat them as numbers’ trophy. Identify where your target market in hanging out the most and communicate with them there.

Groupon/ Daily Deal: Careful, this is the steroid of marketing! This is a very powerful & expensive way to promote business or bring new customer in. It works but just like steroids, if not used properly, it can bring some serious harm. Simply put, you have to be ready to work at a 25% price point (you’ve to offer a minimum of 50% discount and then share the total revenue with the deal site at a 50-50 basis) and the 75% that you just ‘invested’ in customer acquisition can easily go to waste if you don’t convert the deal-shoppers into full paying & returning customers. On the plus side, this marketing is 100% effective for bringing people in, since they already paid for it.

Do any of these sounds like they could help your business? Have you tried any of these before, what was your experience? What are you doing for marketing your business, please share via comments below and help fellow business owners.

Originally posted here

Professor Evelina Flachi, who teaches a Nutrition for the wellbeing course at theUniversità di Milano, is sure of one thing: food, in our lives, has a key role and to underestimate the impact of drastic diets, or, worse, fashions, is not a good idea at all.

Because even if it’s true that we’re more careful today about what we put on our tables, it’s also true that we’re not always well informed on the properties of some foods, letting ourselves be often influenced by advice from friends, so-called experts or publications that are not always very trustworthy.

What is certain is that the relationship between food and wellbeing, and, by consequence, food and beauty, is very strong.

“As I state in my latest book, La Dieta Flachi (Rizzoli editore), we can seriously think of preventing certain illnesses with food, according to age and needs. Choosing the right food is like buying the right anti-aging cream. Of course, everything starts by how we buy our groceries, which must be thought-out and never on intuition.Then it’s all about the cooking methods and the seasoning, which modifies noticeably the properties of the foods and their beneficial effects on our body”.

And it’s not only about keeping an ideal weight, a need that is not only aesthetic, but also especially tied to health. Because, as the doctor explains, by eating well we can influence the beauty of our skin and hair: “As we know beta-carotene, which can be found in yellow or orange fruit and vegetables, is very good for you because it’s the precursor of vitamin A, a powerful antioxidant. Let’s not forget: assimilation is also very important. Certain foods are well assimilated only if well mixed with others: carrots, for example, are perfect if seasoned with a hint of oil”.

For a correct food consumption it’s also useful to consider, of course, the season and the territory: to opt for foods that don’t come from very far away and that are available in certain time frames is also healthy. But, as Flachi underlines, we can’t talk about healthy foods in an absolute sense.

“It’s more a question of finding a variegated regime that suits are lifestyle. Enough with the calorie-counting. We should, instead, focus on the nutritional value of a food, opting for balanced diets like the Mediterranean one instead of high-protein ones, which are now very trendy, but unbalanced and harmful”.

Also because, and we should keep it in mind, inappropriate diets can influence the metabolism, revealing to be a double edged sword. “If we accustom our body to ingest what is barely needed to survive, it will react by slowing down its rhythm. And that is the reason that restrictive and quick diets are less effective and have temporary results, with a typical yo-yo effect”. Why not take advantage of spring to fill your table with season fruit and vegetables, so you can have those five servings that every healthy diet suggests?

“Do we really want to stay thin? Well, if we eat healthy we can.Drinking a glass of water before a meal, eating lots of vegetables, which always make you feel full, and replacing dessert with a nice dish of tasty strawberries, which give us many vitamins and minerals. And, especially, don’t make sacrifices: two free meals a week, in which to enjoy the things we love, will make it easier to follow a healthy lifestyle”.

What to say, instead, of those that choose to trust trends, like the one for detox, which has been very popular in the past months?

“Well, I just say that instead of paying for someone to makes us do a detox diet, we could do it ourselves, at home, in a very healthy way. Water, steamed veggies, salads, fruit, and minestrone. And for a short time we can replace proteins with tofu, spelt and brown rice. It’s also a support diet, and it’s without a doubt healthy and purifying if done for a limited time. I repeat: every diet plan must be personalized. It’s not the person who should adapt to a plan. A good nutritionist should combine the taste and quality of the food to the person’s lifestyle”.

We’re at a critical time, many think about loosing weight quickly for the summer that keeps getting closer. And many go to beauty spas, where food becomes a true beauty treatment. Once again the doctor is very clear about this: “The most important think to learn is managing meals. In beauty spas and hotels that are very careful about the diet regime of their costumers, they explain to their clients how different foods influence positively the organism. For example, I take care of the Rational Nutrition and Weight loss plan of the Hotel Capri Palace, to recover wellness and shape with a detox and healthy diet. Weeks at qualified spas can be useful as a starting input, to think about your own wellness with the help of a guide. The important thing is to keep in mind the rules and good habits you’ve learned: you just have to try hard to not waste the results you’ve gotten!”.

Originally posted on Vogue Italia.

Most days, the actual business of Mr. Kissi and Mr. Gumbs takes place in a work-space-cum-clubhouse on Bergen Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. With vintage sweaters hanging from the ceiling and art books lining the walls, this is the nerve center of the Brooklyn Circus, whose flagship store is just a few dozen steps away, and which is a key collaborative partner for Street Etiquette, which began as a basic beautiful-things blog in 2008 but is now one of the foremost online repositories of black style.

The posts on Street Etiquette straddle the modern and the historical. Mr. Gumbs and Mr. Kissi, both 22, highlight specific themes — floral prints, the saddle shoe and so on — modeling them and detailing their history. They are careful caretakers, respectful students, tailoring loyalists and handsome models.

And they have become Internet-age fashion polymaths: stylists and models, but also writers, preservationists, photographers and editors — and soon, designers and retailers.

Already they have wide reach: Street Etiquette receives 20,000 page views a day. The two men are the most prominent public faces of a new burst of black dandyism taking root in small retail outlets, niche fashion lines and thoughtful style blogs.

“There’s more than one cool now for black people,” Mr. Gumbs said on a recent Tuesday at the Bergen Street studio, wearing a slight wisp of a goatee and dark glasses that sharpened his round face. “When we were growing up, it was just one kind of cool.”

That was hip-hop, with its hegemonic style. But the men of Street Etiquette and their peers practice a deliberate elision of hip-hop style (except in the site’s early days, when the two were still shaking free of their Air Jordans). They even eschew the prim eccentricity of an Andre 3000, or the cosmopolitan flamboyance of Kanye West.

Instead, this generation emphasizes the basics: great fabrics, aggressive tailoring, thoughtful accessorizing. It’s a return to style as a source of dignity, a theme that has run through generations of black American style, from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance to the civil rights era to the mixed messages of the hip-hop era.

Originally posted on the New York Times.

(image via NYT)

For an industry that prides itself on its one-day-you’re-in-next-day-you’re-out ethos, fashion is nevertheless mindful of its own history, where even the flavors of the week must account for decades, if not centuries, of accumulated taste. But embracing this historical reverence without being labeled old-fashioned requires a delicate branding balancing act–something that Honor, a fashion line that debuted its first collection a year ago, is doing by updating a few time-honored design traditions.

The surpassing care makes the brand feel like a souvenir from another time.

To get the look she wanted, Giovanna Randall, an opera singer and pre-med student turned fashion designer, approached Ro and Co, a studio that’s created collateral for designers like Timo Weiland, Candela, and Katherine Fleming. The pitch? To make Honor look as if it were an old-world atelier with a rich history that had been revived. The appeal, creative director Roanne Adams tells Co.Design, was the chance to design something that looked like an established brand without looking old. “Thankfully the name Honor really lent itself to this idea,” she says.

They started by designing a family crest, illustrated by Barcelona-based artist Miguel Abio, that places Honor’s mascot–Randall’s three-legged cat, Oscalina–in the center and framed by more traditionally heraldic imagery like winged birds, floral decoration, and a ribboned banner bearing the line’s name. Around the perimeter is the tag line “Honor the past, honor the present.”

The seal is included on the line’s stationery, which was modeled on the kind of stationery Grace Kelly might have had. The designers made petite business cards that were smaller than usual, each encased in its own tiny envelope so they wouldn’t get dirty, and designed runway invitations that doubled as a box of gourmet macaroons. “Then, we decided to go all the way and not only gold-foil the information on the card but also gold-gild the edges as well as blind emboss the crest,” Adams says. Getting that crest to reproduce perfectly on all the different paper stocks, buttons, stickers, and sew-in labels ended up being the hardest part of all–but it’s the added value of these supposedly disposable objects that makes it feel like a souvenir from another place, a different time, a sturdier era.

Originally posted on Fast Co. Design